Stoya on her new film UnSEXpected, her favorite things, and more

If the movie Weird Science becomes a reality one day, the horny nerds will probably invent a girl who’s a lot like Stoya. The popular Digital Playground star, with model looks and brains to boot, has an enthusiastic appetite for sex unseen since Roman times. The 26-year-old spoke to us about her latest film, UnSEXpected, taking her aerial hobby to new heights, and begging to be D.P’d.

UnSEXpected is your first release in almost a year. Why did you take a break and what brought you back?

There were a few reasons for my hiatus. I firmly believe that the best porn scenes happen when everyone really wants to be there. As a contract performer there are only so many scenes I’m going to do per year, so I want every single one of them to be set up to succeed. In the space of a month, Robby let me shoot with Mr. Marcus, be double penetrated by Steve Holmes and James Deen, and film a really hot anal with James. He made all of my porno dreams (except Rocco Siffredi) come true, and the law of diminishing returns kind of kicked in. Rather than show up for the paycheck and phone it in, I took a break from everything except the big features (Babysitters 2, Top Guns, Fighters) to sort of re-set and let myself miss how much fun having one on one sex with our usual male performers is. I’d rather make less money from scenes each year and be able to confidently tell a consumer that every movie was an amazing experience that I couldn’t wait to get on set to film. Also, Digital Playground kept sitting on my DP scene and I figured if they ran out of movies they’d have to release it.

So when you’re not on the set, how do you like to spend your time?

I kind of work a lot. There’s the promotional work involved with being a contract star: interviews, radio, social networking. There are photoshoots for pornographic magazines (like my spread in the June issue of Penthouse!) and personal projects with artists like the amazingly talented Molly Crabapple and Clayton Cubitt (stoyaville.com). I get a bit more intense with the blogging (stoya.tumblr.com) than is probably necessary for an adult performer, but I really enjoy it. I’d be doing that for fun anyway, but having the occasional piece spark a discussion about sex and sexuality is pretty cool and probably wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t a professionally naked lady. I read on the subway, airplanes, and in bed before I go to sleep. One of these days I’m going to get a blank spot in my schedule long enough to finish up my improv training at the UCB.

I’ve taken up aerial acrobatics and started performing last year, which requires a lot of training, rehearsing, and costuming.

You’ve been getting into Lyra/Aerial Hoop stuff. How does the thrill of doing that compare to porn?

Ha… I started to go on a rant about how much I love the aerial stuff and then saw you were getting there. There are a couple of interesting common threads there. One is definitely exhibitionism. The thrill that I get from being naked for a photoshoot or performing sexual acts for a camera probably comes from the same place as the thrill that I get from doing live performance. Roxie Hart in Chicago sums it up pretty well when she says “My audience loves me. And I love them. And they love me for lovin’ them and I love them for lovin’ me. And we love each other. And that’s cause none of us got enough love in our childhoods. And that’s showbiz, kid.” I did get enough love in my childhood, and I’d like to think that most of my consumer base did as well, but I have this drive to do things that are challenging, maybe a bit unsafe, and take a lot of work and effort for the enjoyment of a bunch of people who are going to (hopefully) respond positively. The applause or laughter is frankly a bit addicting. In pornography, the response is delayed. Movies have to be edited, packaged, and then sold. Live performance is instant gratification.

They say that if you do what you love for a living you’ll never work a day in your life. Is that true for you?

Yes. So much yes. I’ve managed to stumble into a career where I get to do things I enjoy and talk about how much I enjoy them. I hear feedback from men that my obvious enjoyment of my job is what attracts them, I hear from women that say my obvious enjoyment had encouraged them to be more comfortable with their own figures, vulvas, and sexual interests. It’s pretty freaking magical and I’m not sure how I got so lucky. Bonus points for the fact that somehow literature, sewing, and the acrobatic performance stuff has managed to work itself into my brand pretty seamlessly.

Does eavesdropping on scenes featuring your co-stars make you go for it more when it’s your turn to go on camera?

There *is* something to be said for the energy on set when everyone is having a great day, but I go for it as much as humanly possible every time I go to work.

You’re at a point in your career where you can pretty much pick who you want to perform with on-camera, do porn stars ever hit on you to get work? Who are your favorite people to work with?

Actually, I’ve always had a choice in who I work with in scenes. I need to be attracted to whoever I’m working with and Digital Playground has always been accommodating about it. Um. It never occurred to me that someone might hit on me to get work and the entire concept makes me a bit sad, so I’m going to pretend I never saw that and move on. I consistently love working with Kayden Kross and James Deen, which I’m sure is pretty obvious at this point. I adore Erik Everhard and Manuel Ferrara as well. Katsuni will always be one of the most amazing women I’ve ever had the pleasure of having sex with. I hope I get to work with Mr. Pete and Mick Blue again sometime soon, and (again) have never had the opportunity to work with Rocco and really want to make that happen somehow.

Do you go on dates with people who aren’t in the business? Are you upfront with them about what you do?

I do. I’m always up front about my job with everyone, and usually people that I go on dates with are at least on the fringes of, if not in, my social group. I do run through a full-disclosure kind of thing as casually as possible so that they know what they’re getting into, and unless I’m having sex with a regularly working (and therefore regularly tested) member of the adult industry I always use condoms.

I heard you had to beg to be allowed to do a DP scene. Was it just something you had to try? What was that experience like?

It’s kind of a saga so I wrote a whole blog about it a while back, but I’ll try to give you the short version. When I first started shooting anal scenes, Dana Dearmond gave me a crash course in how to take care of my butthole. During this conversation she mentioned that DP’s were possibly more fun than buttsex. I was super curious about it, but double penetration was a bit difficult to arrange in my personal life with non-performers. The next year at AVN I grilled Katsuni for stories and advice. She suggested that I go to my favorite male performers to have anal sex with (Erik Everhard and James Deen) and find out who they work well with for DP’s. Erik said that James and Steve Holmes were the best case scenario for this particular act. This was when AVN was still held at the Venetian, and I ran into Joanna Angel and James at the Circle Bar after the convention. I was most of the way through explaining my quest to be DP’d when Steve Holmes happened to walk up behind us. All the necessary parts were there, so James herded us all upstairs for a trial run. The thing about being DP’d is that it’s so intensely pleasurable there’s no room for intellectualizing it. It’s just really awesome. I called Robby on my way to the airport shortly after and left him a detailed, graphic description of what I’d been up to for most of the evening and then started bugging him and Joone to let me do it again on set. Digital Playground’s scripts don’t really call for it, and apparently it’s difficult to keep the same quality of picture/lighting with the cameras we use when there are that many genitals piled up in the same place, but they did let me do it. When the trailer was finished Joone showed it to me and said he’d never seen a performer as happy to be on a set as I was that day.

Do you ever have vanilla sex in your personal life or is it always epic?

Who says vanilla sex can’t be epic? Also, what exactly is vanilla sex anymore? I would like to discuss this with you further.

What were your parent’s attitudes about sex while you were growing up?

My mother was a feminist and kind of a hippy. She handed me a mirror and a flashlight at 12 and told me I should get to know my vagina before I introduced it to anyone else. If I had questions she was available to talk to, but aside from the mirror/flashlight bit and the occasional quip about condoms or how counterproductive faking orgasms is, she let me and my peers figure it out ourselves. My dad was a serious career man for most of my childhood, we’ve been far closer in the past six years than we were when I was younger, and I don’t remember him ever weighing in on the subject when I was growing up.

If you can trust Wikipedia, some of your early jobs before porn include being a secretary, flier distributor and a go-go dancer. Did you have any other jobs pre-porn and what was the worst?

You can’t really trust wikipedia, but all of those things are accurate. I also worked as a hostess in an italian restaurant, in a Subway for a week, as a sales clerk in a super high end baby boutique, personal assistant, and entry level marketing. The baby boutique was the worst, no contest. I will probably never have children purely to avoid having to ever fold another onesie.

I don’t worry about it too much. I really like raw vegetables and fruit. I also eat super greasy cheeseburgers a couple of times a week and have been known to down three milkshakes in a sitting. I like my butt and want to keep it as curvy as possible. I lucked out in the metabolism department, the aerial stuff takes a lot of energy, and I live in NYC which means I get a lot of ambient exercise from walking.

Do you have a celebrity crush?

I am pretty fond of early 2000’s Stephen Dorff, but I have no idea what he looks like now.

Where do you see yourself in 15 years? Personally and professionally.

I have no idea… and that’s part of the fun. When I started in adult five years ago, I never would have guessed that my life would be this awesome now. As long as I keep doing productive and interesting things, I’m happy to let my path take me wherever it goes.

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